Alone Together
by welcome to maddieland
Summary: -"Let's be alone together, we can stay young forever." Massie thinks back on her first year of college and the strange way Todd Lyons fit into her life. AU.
1. Chapter 1

**Pairing**: Todd/Massie

**Notes**: After a year, I'm back! This once again takes place in my beloved Texas, but has no connection to This Town, even though Abbie Block is featured. This came from the heart, and I think it'll continue to flow. Let me know what y'all think?

* * *

The thing you have to understand is this:

My relationship with Todd Lyons, known to my close friends and family as the Snapchat Boy Debacle, is entirely my fault. I replied to his texts, I answered his questions about university, I flirted back, and I added him on Snapchat. I led him on, and then I fell for him and broke my own heart while fantasizing about what we could have been.

This clarity, however, only comes when I lift my head out of the fog of denial and heartbreak long enough to let reality slap me in the face. So when I'm not blaming myself, I'm blaming my mother.

Kendra is unique in that she never succumbed to the PTA Mom Crowd. She never became friends with my friends' parents. She never volunteered in the classroom or participated in carpool rotations. Why? Because she happened to have a life. Unlike a lot of the other moms in Westchester, Texas, she worked full-time to support me, Bean, and Abigail. She wasn't friendless, though; all of her friends from college lived within a ten mile radius, and during every holiday, birthday, or special occasion, we were loaded into the car and deposited at the house of one of the college friends for a Nice Family Dinner.

We see the Fisher family the most, seeing as they are literally five minutes away from our luxury townhome. Harris Fisher is a year older than me, and like most good Texas boys, attends Texas A&M University. Cam Fisher is a year younger than me, and also aims to attend A&M. Both have pretty, tiny blond girlfriends, and both communicate solely in grunts. Their two favorite subjects are soccer and hunting, neither of which I know anything about. I usually spend these dinners talking to Mr. and Mrs. Fisher, known affectionately as Uncle Dennis and Uncle Jean.

The family we see the second most is the Marvil family. Much like my own father, Mr. Marvil checked out sometime after the youngest Marvil daughter, Dylan, was born. In between child support paychecks, Mrs. Marvil—who we all just call Merri-Lee—writes a parenting column for The Daily Westchester and teaches broadcast journalism at Octavian County High School. Ryan, her oldest daughter, is fixing to graduate from A&M and is a firm believer in her Southern Baptist faith. Jamie, her second oldest daughter, is also at A&M. Dylan still goes to OCHS, is in the same grade as my sister, and does competitive cheerleading.

The family we see the third most is the Lyons family. Mr. Lyons works for an oil company and moves the family around quite a bit. They've been everywhere from D.C. to Dallas to Houston to London. Somewhere in between transfers, Mrs. Lyons put her foot down and they bought a permanent home back in Westchester. While we really only ever see the Lyons at Christmas, their two children have had more of an impact on me than they ever could have guessed.

Claire Lyons is two years older than me. Blonde hair, blue eyes, clear skin, slender figure. She went to high school in London and spent her summers in Prague. She once interned at Hampton Court, the former residence of Henry VIII. Most of her wardrobe is from Paris. She never gets flustered, and even when I'm talking in a normal voice about normal teenage girl things, she has a way of looking at me that makes me think I am actually completely crazy and I need to shut up immediately. Then she gives me a small smile and starts talking about the beaches in Spain.

Of course I wanted to be like her. She applied exclusively to Southern Ivy League schools, so I applied exclusively to Southern Ivy League Schools. She declared as an art history major, so I told everyone that I wanted to be an art history major. She pledged Kappa, so I swore up and down that I would be a Kappa. Of course, upon entering my freshman year at Wake Forest University, I realized that where Claire was driven and put-together, I was lazy and generally a hot mess. I ended up pledging Theta and declaring as a Communications major. I could feel her shaking her head at me all the way from Vanderbilt.

And then there's Todd.

Pre-Debacle, I didn't think much of Todd at all. He was just a Teenage Boy, two grades below me, and he ran in some of the same crowds as my sister Abbie, even though she went to OCHS and he went to Briarwood Secondary School, the private high school. He played football and baseball and liked video games. He made fart jokes. He terrorized my sister's friends. The few times I did try to engage with him, he would also give me the "you're crazy" look, and I would quietly ask my mother if it was time to leave yet.

Therefore, during the winter holidays immediately following my freshman fall semester in college, when my mother happily announced that we were to have lunch with the Lyons family at the restaurant in Nordstrom's, I drove us towards the Galleria with an impending sense of dread.

-x-

At the time of this lunch, I was feeling more or less incredibly depressed. Wake Forest was harder than anything I had ever experienced during my time at OCHS, and the people there were less than accommodating. I had spent the first two and a half months at school begging my mother to let me transfer to the University of Texas, to which she firmly replied, "No." Feeding my misery was my also incredibly depressed best friend at school, Chris Plovert. He was gay as a picnic basket but could not admit it to his uber-conservative mother, so we turned my dorm room into a cesspool of sadness and coped by eating entire boxes of Oreos and watching _Lost_. My roommate Nina hated us.

I had finished the semester with strong grades, though, and I was ready to return to the dreadful North Carolina winter with a renewed sense of purpose. I wanted to join a sorority, I wanted to take more film classes, and I wanted to drink more. All of that was firmly within my grasp as I settled down across the table from Todd at lunch.

Somewhere between family dinners, Todd had grown up. His baby fat hat melted away. He towered over me now. He still played football and baseball, but his eyes sparked with a playful intelligence. He was 17. I was 19. He ordered a gourmet burger, and I had the lobster bisque.

As always, Mom tried to facilitate a conversation between me and Claire, who was now a junior at Vanderbilt. Claire engaged me for about five minutes before shutting me down with the "you're crazy" look and I turned to my soup in defeat. When I looked up, though, Todd was staring at me, and for the first time, one of the Lyons siblings looked at me like I was a person, not a silly child.

"So," Todd began, casually popping French fries into his mouth. "What would you say is the most important thing I should know before going to college?"

"Know your limits before you go out," I blurted. This instigated a slightly scandalized look from Claire and an eye-roll from Abbie. "You don't want to spend the night puking into your recycling bucket."

"Bad night?" Todd said with a knowing smirk.

"You have no idea." One night, Chris, my friend Olivia, and I had done six consecutive vodka shots with no chaser. Chris ended up in another boy's bed, Olivia ended up at her favorite frat, and I ended up on my dorm room rug, waiting miserably for God to stop punishing me.

"Where do you get your alcohol from?" Todd asked. I nodded in Kendra's direction. Mom had stocked me up during Parents' Weekend, and my friends and I had been benefitting ever since.

"That's awesome," Todd laughed.

"One of my sisters gave me her old fake," Claire offered. I grinned at them both. The Lyons siblings were actually engaging with me!

"Where do you get yours, Todd?" I asked.

Todd shrugged. "Liquor cabinets, I guess."

"How does drinking in high school even work? What if y'all need to drive home but y'all are all drunk, or what if you want to hook up with someone? Wouldn't you just see them the next day?" I couldn't believe this was spilling out of my mouth. I rarely hooked up at school as it was.

Todd crunched down on the last of his fries. "I just go to OCHS parties instead of Briarwood ones. Then there's less of a chance of running into the randos."

I shook my head. This boy was not of the same caliber of guys who hung out with my sister Abbie.

"Massie," Mom snapped, as though she had been calling my name several times already. The four of us turned to Mrs. Lyons, who had a serene smile on her face but a sad look in her eyes.

"Since we're all here, I thought we might as well share Jay's news," she began. Todd slumped back in his chair, and Claire took a large gulp of wine.

"I'm not sure how to put this," Mr. Lyons sighed.

"We're buying a new summer home," Mrs. Lyons butted in. "Guess where it is."

"Cozumel?" My mother guessed.

"Warmer," Mrs. Lyons replied.

"The Bahamas?" One of the older, childless College Friends piped up from the end of the table.

"Warmer," Mrs. Lyons sing-songed.

"Argentina," Mr. Lyons blurted. "Buenos Aires. I'm being transferred again."

Abbie and I turned back to the Lyons children as Mrs. Lyons explained that she and Todd would stay in Westchester until he finished high school. Once he graduated, they would spend most of the year in Argentina and the summer back in Texas. I searched Todd and Claire's faces. They knew this, and they had accepted this already, even though they weren't overly thrilled about it.

The lunch ended soon after Mr. Lyons's announcement, and the parents herded the kids together for the annual "look how much they've grown!" picture. I somehow ended up next to Todd. The flash went off, and my sister and I bolted for the door.

We ended up going to different Christmas services that year, so I figured that that was the last I would see of the Lyons clan until summer. As I waited impatiently for church to start, however, Todd miraculously dragged up my number from an exchange years ago and decided to ask me a question.

TODD: sorry to bother you. Did you submit your SAT scores to wake?

I smacked Abbie on the arm and showed her the surprise text.

"I don't like Todd," Abbie declared. I frowned at her. "He screwed over my friend Kelsey in the 7th grade."

I stared at her quizzically. "Yeah, because it was the 7th grade. Everyone was awful then."

She shook her head. "He's just not a good person."

I turned back to my phone and told him that I had only submitted my ACT scores.

We talked until my mom reached over and slapped my iPhone out of my hand. We talked about our respective addictions to Instagram, about the TV shows we had been watching over winter break, and about Claire. A conversation that meant nothing, but started everything.

At the time, I thought it was funny. Later on, I would hate myself for ever indulging him. So when I thought back to how this whole ridiculous mess got started, I blamed my mother. If she hadn't made me go to that damn lunch, I would have never talked to Todd about drinking. He would have never thought to ask me about SAT scores. I would have never kept his number in my phone.

It was all Kendra's fault.


	2. Chapter 2

Thanks for all the wonderful reviews y'all!

**Disclaimer**: All characters belong to Lisi Harrison. All Greek organizations mentioned below are in no way affiliated with any real Greek sorority or fraternity.

* * *

Blaming my mother, however, doesn't always work. Mostly because it really isn't her fault, and mostly because I really, truly love my mother, and I can't hate her for anything.

So in my darkest moments, I blame not my mother, but the Lambda fraternity.

-x-

I really didn't want to go to the date function. The whole thing was entirely last minute and incredibly awkward.

The first Friday in March, Theta mixed with Lambda. They had a cookout and I went with a few of my pledge sisters. We sat on one of their couches in a row, smiling demurely and silently vowing to leave as soon as the barbeque ran out. While all of the Lambda boys were overwhelmingly nice and accommodating, none of them were very rich or attractive, and all of them were awkward around girls.

Somehow, though, I ended up the only one left on the couch, surrounded by Lambda brothers and drinking rum out of a red solo cup at what was supposed to be a dry event. I never intend for these things to happen. In high school, I had taken a very Cher Horowitz attitude towards high school boys, thus alienating the entire OCHS male population. As a result, at Wake, I tended to get excited when I received boy attention, even if it was from the nerdy ones.

"Are all Theta events going to be dry?" one Lambda brother asked me.

"I hope not," I replied. "I like to drink."

"Then you should come out to our lounge tonight," he said.

"Yes!" the brothers chorused. "Come out to our lounge tonight!"

I had not intended to go out that night. But like the Lost Boys prevailing upon Wendy to tell them another bedtime story, I promised the Lambda brothers that I would stop by their lounge that night. I texted Chris—who happened to be hooking up with one of the Lambda brothers—and we threw on our party tanks and seized the night.

My mistake was not playing flip cup, or beer pong, or stumbling into the boy's restroom by accident, or drinking way too much of their gin punch. My mistake was signing the orange book.

At Wake, everyone who enters an on-campus party, dry or not, is supposed to put their name down in one of the orange books allotted to the party host so that if a liability issue comes up, the school knows who was there and when. There's also a system of wristbands and sharpies, but most of the frats just turned a blind eye, especially if you were wearing a short skirt and a happy, drunk smile. Lambda, for some reason, made me sign the orange book.

My best guess is that the next morning, a Lambda brother named Dempsey Solomon approached the Lambda social chair and confessed that he still did not have a date to Lambda's Shots Around the World date function, which was happening that night. The social chair probably texted every girl he knew and found that they were all taken that night. At that point, he probably reached for the orange book and flipped through the list of who had attended the lounge party the night before.

Lo and behold, his eyes must have fallen upon the name Massie Block, the nice girl who drank rum at the dry mixer and accidentally fell on the floor and started giggling when beer pong got out of hand.

The social chair added me on Facebook, which I accepted in a hungover haze. Then, while complaining to my mother on the phone about the state of my hangover, my phone buzzed with a new Facebook message.

"Hold on," I grumbled, putting Kendra on speaker and opening up Messenger. The message was straightforward—would I please be Dempsey's date to the date function that night?

"Holy shit," I screeched.

"What?" Mom yelled back.

"I just got invited to a date function!" I shouted. Nina and her friend Sydney, who were sipping ginger ale and recounting their own wild nights on the other side of the room, shot me impressed glances. The antisocial girl was finally getting out of bed!

Kendra burst into a series of excited shrieks. I then realized that even if I didn't want to go—which I really didn't, because I had homework to do—I had to, because Kendra would never let me hear the end of it if I skipped out.

So I told the social chair yes and got Dempsey's number, and we agreed to be Korea, which apparently required nothing more of me than putting on a white dress. With an acute longing for Texas, I told him that tequila was my favorite alcohol, and he hit up the liquor store while I spent a long afternoon at the nail salon.

-x-

Todd and I had had a brief dialogue up until that point. He was curious about Wake and what Greek life was like. I took a more sisterly approach to our friendship at first, telling him to stop sending me selfies while he was driving and to go back to class instead of texting me. We talked a lot about alcohol and often sent each other pictures of our fridges, mine usually full of Malibu and his full of beer. I promised him that if he ever came to visit Wake, we would go out and party hard.

The night of the date function, my nerves were at peak level. I felt fat and I had no idea what Dempsey was like or what I was getting myself in to. I wasn't even sure if I could stomach another night of hard alcohol. So to ease my nerves, I texted Chris and Abbie. While flopping around on my bed waiting for a pledge driver to call me, my eyes fell upon my Texas flag, and I happily remembered that it was Texas Independence Day. I snapped a selfie of me next to my flag and sent it on to Todd with the greeting, "Happy Texas Independence Day!" I received a picture of his cowboy boots in response. The pledge driver called me and I went on my merry way to the Lambda house.

-x-

For the record, I don't smoke weed on a regular basis. My friends Olivia and Alicia do, though, and they're always willing to share with me, the blushing baby virgin. One of the best nights of my life was when we all went out together one night in October, drank way too much Nyquil punch at the Sigma house, and then smoked a joint out on the lawn. I coughed like I had just contracted tuberculosis, but I felt so light and happy that I just rolled around on the grass, enjoying the feeling of my feet sinking into the earth. I smoked one more time with them in early November, and I hadn't touched the stuff since.

Dempsey, however, had come prepared. Spread out on a coffee table for me to enjoy was Jager, Mountain Dew, tequila, limes, orange juice, and a baggie of weed, but "only if I was in to that sort of stuff." I started in on some tequila sunrises and happily told Dempsey that yes, I would love to smoke later that night.

The party took a while to start happening, and the tequila took a while to kick in. Once the music started pounding and the liquor started racing through my veins, I excitedly yelled to Dempsey that I was ready to light up. He and a few of his buddies grabbed their bong and their grinder and we spread out in the living room of the Lambda house.

I remember flashes of the night from there on out. I remember taking shots of jager while toasting to Texas Independence Day. I remember a Lamda brother holding the bong for me as I attempted to inhale. I remember texting my study drug dealer from home, Griffin Hastings, and excitedly informing him of how high I was. I remember playing beer pong and accidentally ripping my dress. And, of course, I remember engaging in a selfie war with Todd, sending him pictures of me stoned out of my fucking mind while he sent me snapshots from his night, which apparently consisted of him drinking at a friend's house and then going out for milkshakes. I prevailed upon him to eat a honey butter chicken biscuit in my honor, even though neither of us were near a Whataburger. Our texts got progressively more slurred.

TODD: Yoore cooler then abigiale

MASSIE: Fo sho

I was touched! Todd had always regarded us with equal disdain, but I had risen to something greater in his eyes.

He left me with a final text.

TODD: snapchat: lyonman

I don't think we had ever once discussed the app, which I mainly used to send gross pictures of myself to Chris and Abbie. But with heavy fingers I added him on Snapchat and continued to drink the night away.

I'm pretty sure the jagerbombs did me in, because that's when I started to black out.

I probably danced for a while with Dempsey and had drunken conversations with various Lambda brothers. I wish I remembered that, because I all too unfortunately remember what happened next.

I stumbled upstairs to go to the bathroom. I pounded on the door but got no response. I was too out of it to try the door handle. I started puking outside the bathroom door. A Lambda brother somehow got me from outside the bathroom to the porch, where I continued to vomit my guts out. I faintly recall Dempsey yelling into his phone to a pledge driver, telling him to come get me and take me back to my dorm. I remember riding back with my head hanging out the window, giggling as I enjoyed the breeze. I somehow got past my RA and gleefully pulled off my dress and fell fast asleep in nothing but my bra and underwear. I woke up the next morning furiously hungover, and I sat for a long time and stared at the puke stains on my white dress, watching them turn into brown swirls before vomiting again.

I called my mom, as I always did the morning after a party.

"I think I sent a bunch of dumb selfies of myself to Todd Lyons," I told her about halfway through our conversation.

"I think it's so funny that you two text all the time," Mom replied. "You know I met his girlfriend the other day? Judi and I got together for lunch and the two of them were fixing to go out."

"Wait, what?" I snapped. Never once had Todd ever mentioned his girlfriend.

"Yeah, and the craziest thing is that her name is Massey too! Well, she spells hers with an –ey at the end. Her family co-started a big non-profit back in Houston and to honor the partners, they named her after one of them. She's a sweet girl."

"Then why the hell does he keep texting me all the time?" I grumbled.

"Maybe he thinks you're easier to talk to about college stuff than his sister," Mom suggested. "Hey, church starts in 15 minutes, can I call you back?"

"The Lord can wait, Mom," I whined. "I'm really sick."

"Go eat a quesadilla," she suggested and hung up. Greasy food was her catch-all hangover cure. All I wanted was a large Sprite and a honey butter chicken biscuit, neither of which were an option.

Mere seconds after hanging up with my mother, a push notification lit up my screen.

It was a snapchat from lyonman. Todd. I just vaguely remembered adding him the night before.

The picture was of him outside our church with the caption, 'I miss you!' Being in no fit state to take a picture of myself, I texted him back.

MASSIE: Yes I miss you too which is why you should come visit Wake so we can do jagerbombs and smoke

TODD: You smoke?

I recounted my night for him, and he told me how much he wished he could be there. He went in to church, and I attempted to take a nap.

-x-

That was truly the moment when everything changed. If I hadn't been nervous about going to Lambda, I wouldn't have texted Todd in the first place. If the Lambda brothers hadn't gotten me drunk and high as a motherfucking kite, I wouldn't have seen his name at the top of my iMessage log and been tempted to text him more. He wouldn't have told me to add him on Snapchat, and we wouldn't have plunged down this slippery slope.

So really, it's entirely the fault of the Lambda brotherhood.


End file.
